Online ordering without the 13–30% platform commission: what we build instead

A restaurant, butcher or bar that takes €3.000 a month through a delivery platform hands over €390–€450 of it at the standard 13–15% commission. Choose the all-in package with the platform's couriers and it is 25–35%: €750–€1.050 a month, every month, on orders from customers who already knew your name. Emerce and the trade press have tracked the increases for years; the direction has only ever been up.

An ordering system on your own website costs money once, then a few tens of euros a month to run. At €3.000 of monthly orders it pays for itself inside the first year even at the low commission tier; at €10.000 a month it pays for itself in a quarter. The platform still has a place — as a discovery channel for people who have never heard of you. It is a bad place to serve the people who have.

What we are building for a fourth-generation Amsterdam butcher

The client is a butcher with an eetsalon, in business since 1923, with a lunch trade, office customers and a neighbourhood that orders the same things every week. They wanted WordPress and WooCommerce, because their team knows it. So that is the base. Everything on top of it is ours: a custom theme, our own plugins, and not a single freemium plugin with an upsell banner. The renewed site launches soon; this is what is in it.

• Ordering in place. Tap a product and a sheet opens over the menu — description, allergens, options, drinks to go with it — with the URL following so every product is still its own indexable page for Google. No page loads between "I want that" and "in the basket".
• Time slots tied to real opening hours. Pick-up or delivery, today or planned a month ahead, with the kitchen's lead time and the holiday hours built in. The site knows it is Sunday.
• Shared orders. One person opens a table, colleagues join from their own phones, everyone adds their own sandwich, one checkout at the end. Nearby open tables show up for people ordering from the same building. The kitchen gets one ticket, labelled per person.
• Business customers on account. Offices order lunch on invoice: a minimum order, one invoice a month, several billing profiles per company so each department pays for its own events. Orders that stay unpaid too long become an invoice automatically, with a reminder button in the console.
• Loyalty points, welcome points and expiry — the client's own scheme, no third-party app skimming the data.
• iDEAL through a Dutch payment provider, so a paid order closes itself. No manual reconciliation.
• A counter console. Orders per time slot with sound, kitchen tickets, the menu, opening hours, holidays and the order minimums as plain settings. Built so a new Saturday hire can run it without a manual.

None of that exists in a WooCommerce plugin catalogue. Some of it exists as five plugins that fight each other. We would rather write it once, cleanly, and own it.

The same system for restaurants, bars and pubs

The table logic carries over almost unchanged: guests open the website from a card or QR on the table, add whatever they want to the table's order, and the bar or kitchen sees it per table on one screen — who ordered what, what is paid, what is still open. No app to install, no platform tablet on the counter, no commission. We tailor the flow to the venue: rounds for a pub, courses for a restaurant, pre-orders for events. Ask us about it.

The running costs, honestly

• Payments. iDEAL transactions cost roughly €0,29–€0,35 each with Dutch providers — a fixed fee, not a percentage. On a €25 order that is about 1,3%.
• Hosting. A plain server we manage. Tens of euros a month, not a "platform fee".
• Delivery. Your own courier, or a third-party courier service booked per delivery. The point is that the customer relationship — the e-mail address, the order history, the loyalty balance — stays yours.

When the platform still wins

If you have no regulars yet and no marketing budget, the platform's marketplace is paid discovery and it can be worth the cut. If your kitchen cannot handle time-slot planning, an ordering site will not fix operations. And if your menu changes hourly, a system with a proper menu editor matters more than any front-end polish; we build that editor first.

We are finishing the butcher's site now and will publish the full case study when it is live. If you run a place that pays commission on customers who already love you, tell us about the menu — we will show you the system on a real screen.